Another opinion on Embedded Analytics

(Posted by Guest Blogger, Gib Bassett)

This morning on DMReview.com, there appeared under Industry News an article titled “InforSense Expands to Meet Customer Demand for Embedded Enterprise Analytics”, which sounded interesting given that Enterprise Decision Management (EDM) includes the concept of deploying analytics into business processes.  Although I have not heard of this company, I was particularly curious to see what it had to say about the role of business rules in their offering.

Viewing the article, I was impressed by the statement “Embedded analytics is a key enabler for process-driven business intelligence (BI)” and that:

“The BI market is forecast to show a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.6 percent, reaching nearly $6.8 billion in 2011. As companies are standardizing around platforms and making BI more strategic and pervasive, and also increasingly embedding BI functionality into the workflow and business processes, the case for BI as a mission-critical necessity increases" noted Gartner, Inc. in its report "Forecast: Business Intelligence Platforms, Worldwide, 2006-2011, by Dan Sommer," Colleen Graham et al, October 2006.”

This all seemed so timely given that I just blogged about how programmers could learn a lesson from Business Intelligence (BI) professionals, in the context of empowering business users.  Unlike that case, here BI is described as a key component of enterprise business process and workflow.  While I could not agree more, I would say that overlooking the role of business rules is akin to thousands of commuting drivers trying to cross a chasm without a bridge – it isn’t happening.  Without a highly scalable enterprise platform for managing the decisions underpinning a business’s critical processes which considers both rules and analytics, “Embedded Enterprise Analytics” sounds an awful like typical BI output (batch reports and pivot tables).